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Look at htmx, i find the approach refreshing and elegant. May not be a fit for you, and does not address styling but it's an interesting, powerful technology.
Nice essays too:
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SurveyJS
Open-Source JSON Form Builder to Create Dynamic Forms Right in Your App. With SurveyJS form UI libraries, you can build and style forms in a fully-integrated drag & drop form builder, render them in your JS app, and store form submission data in any backend, inc. PHP, ASP.NET Core, and Node.js.
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Are you making this project specifically to learn new things and modern tools and workflows? Or are you trying to build a product?
If it's the latter, just build your standard dynamic monolithic web app using boring technology that you know. If it doesn't need to be dynamic, even better, build your standard static site.
You can always add dynamism and frontend frameworks on top of it to meet your and your users' needs, and you can always add the new shiny library or framework you want to try out, too.
If it's the former, go on https://hn.algolia.com and search for this same question, as it's been asked in a variety of different contexts with a variety of different answers that can help you decide exactly what modern technologies are right for what you're trying to accomplish. I bring it up not to say that this question is redundant or anything, but just as an aside if you don't know about it and want to see what others have said about it in the past.
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Astro - https://astro.build/
Is probably the fastest thing you can use with extremely sensible defaults and that you can use alongside most web frameworks.
I've been using React for 6 years but this has changed my view of what is possible. You can write React/Vue and have it compiled statically or keep the component's interactivity.
It's the tool I had been looking for for years.
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I can recommend Kirby (https://getkirby.com/), a flat file PHP CMS. It’s fast, has a panel to update data and can be hosted on any basically any PHP host. Just use the quite simple PHP-templates and add CSS & JS like you already know how to do. No need to complicate things.
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I still write basic HTML, styled using any of a number of simple classless CSS templates, like Pico.
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Prisma
Next-generation ORM for Node.js & TypeScript | PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, SQL Server, SQLite, MongoDB and CockroachDB
If you're already looking at Next.js + Tailwind but unsure about what to use for the DB, I'd recommend checking out the T3 stack [1].
It uses tRPC [2] for type-safe API calls and Prisma [3] for your DB. There's lots of content out there teaching how to use this stack to build sophisticated apps (e.g. this in-depth tutorial teaching how to build a social media app [4]).
Disclaimer: I work at Prisma and am also a huge fan of type-safety, so T3 is basically my dream stack.
[2] https://trpc.io/
[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqVm5_G1ZEE&ab_channel=WebDe...
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WorkOS
The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning.
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If you're already looking at Next.js + Tailwind but unsure about what to use for the DB, I'd recommend checking out the T3 stack [1].
It uses tRPC [2] for type-safe API calls and Prisma [3] for your DB. There's lots of content out there teaching how to use this stack to build sophisticated apps (e.g. this in-depth tutorial teaching how to build a social media app [4]).
Disclaimer: I work at Prisma and am also a huge fan of type-safety, so T3 is basically my dream stack.
[2] https://trpc.io/
[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqVm5_G1ZEE&ab_channel=WebDe...
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It's simple. Just take the hydraulic react redux emulator, and attach it to the transdimensional photon nodejs emitter. Bam! New website.
But seriously, nerds these days don't make it easy. Pretty sure they revel in the complexity. The nicest simple stack I've found is this:
1. FastAPI backend - this is almost really good for getting a simple backend running. Some downsides:
- some astonishments, bugs: [1] [2]
- it's coupled with Pydantic, which can get confusing because you end up with basically two sets of models if you use an ORM: your ORM "actual models" and then your Pydantic validation models. Just got a little confusing
- uvicorn? gunicorn? unicorn? WSGI? who?
- it's python, so you'll have to deal with cringe and blue-pilled dependency management, among other things
2. Vanilla HTML, CSS, and JS - nice thing about FastAPI is you can be flexible with how you implement the frontend. I've used it to make everything from simple SPA's using vanilla web components to traditional templated SSR sites, and mixes therein.